心靈哲學

Self is a core issue in philosophy of mind in particular and in philosophy in general. We will focus on this issue in this course. It is a topic that deals with who we are, which bears direct implications for whether and how we may survive death. This issue in the Western traditions can be traced back to ancient Greek philosophy which construes the big question of knowing yourself as the most fundamental issue in philosophy. Throughout its intellectual history, Christian religion and modern science have brought serious impacts on the development of how Westerners struggle with this basic human concern. In other civilizations such as Asia and the Islamic world, this issue has received no less attention and been dealt with in a highly profound manner. The aim of this course is to delve into this big concern in a way that is philosophically vigorous while cross-culturally sensitive.

In this course, our aim is to better understand some of the fundamental ways of thinking in the Western, Eastern, and Islamic intellectual traditions. We will focus on how, in some very different ways, both traditions answer the metaphysical question concerning what a self is, the epistemological issue of how we come to know a self, and the ethical question regarding how a self is situated in the human world. By the end of this course, we hope to gain a deeper appreciation of how these distinctively diverse ways of thinking remain operative and deeply influential in a wide variety of contemporary disciplines and domains of knowledge in the practical world. By doing this, we aspire to find our way further in the most uncertain times of ours.